Site Mobile Navigation

Don’t Care to Send the Very Best?

A few weeks ago, Laura Bonner received an e-mail alert at her office computer: A friend she hadn’t heard from in ages had sent her an electronic greeting from a Web site called Someecards.com. “I think I actually groaned,” said Ms. Bonner, 26, a subsidiary rights manager for Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “I mean, really, an e-card?”

Ms. Bonner ignored the message for as long as she could. Finally, at day’s end, she clicked on the link, expecting to find a typically treacly online greeting, the kind that assaults the eyes and ears with bright colors and cloying music. Instead she saw a simple sketch of a smiling elderly man in a bowling shirt, with a caption that read: “I’m glad we stay mildly interested in each other’s lives.”

“I laughed out loud,” she recalled. “I was instantly obsessed with the site.”

Though electronic greetings were once supposed to make traditional cards passé, today many e-cards are just as cringe-inducing as their tangible store-bought counterparts. But in the last year, a new wave of e-card sites have emerged, seeking a hipper audience with sarcastic, edgy and proudly vulgar messages.

Since its introduction in April, Someecards .com says more than 700,000 cards have been sent from the site, ranging from traditional birthday and get-well wishes to cards from more offbeat categories, like Cry for Help, and Flirting.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever seen cards made specifically for people with emotional baggage, which is pretty much everyone I know,” said Matt Ian, a 34-year-old creative director at the advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty, who said he sends at least three or four cards from Someecards.com a day. “That ‘Hang In There’ cat swinging from the tree branch just doesn’t cut it anymore.”

Many Americans would disagree. According to the Internet research firm Media Metrix, the top 20 e-card sites in the country had approximately 29 million unique American visitors in July, the most recent month for which data is available. The most popular site, AmericanGreetings.com, had over 7 million hits that month.

Photo

In most cases, these e-card sites are deliberately courting mass appeal. “Our sites are popular with a broad range of consumers,” said Frank Cirillo, a spokesman for AG Interactive, the group that owns the e-card sites AmericanGreetings.com, Egreetings.com and BlueMountain.com. “Some of our cards are edgier than others, but for the most part, our material is family-friendly.”

The most audacious cards on the AG Interactive sites are labeled “mature” and carry warnings that some users may find their content objectionable. One of them, a birthday card called “Lick the Batter” shows a man’s burly arms and bare torso. Chippendales-style music thumps in the background as he mixes a cake batter, which inevitably splatters onto his skin.

“We’re trying to keep up with demand across age groups and tastes in humor, so we don’t get into the more risqué stuff,” Mr. Cirillo said. “If people want that, they can go somewhere else.”

This kind of thinking has created an opening for edgier sites like Someecards.com, whose most popular card is a vintage black-and-white illustration of a little boy sitting on a stack of books, bearing the message: “When work feels overwhelming, remember that you’re going to die.”

“We wanted it to be more than just a place you go to send an e-card,” said Duncan Mitchell, a creator of Someecards.com. “We also wanted it to be somewhere people could go and just read.”

Mr. Mitchell, 37, a creative director at MRM Worldwide, and his business partner, Brook Lundy, 36, a creative director for the interactive marketing agency Avenue A/Razorfish, first met when they worked at the advertising agency Tribal DDB Worldwide. For months, the two had been looking at other electronic greeting sites, but, Mr. Lundy said, “there wasn’t a single message there that we’d ever want to send.”

Mr. Lundy had also written for the satirical newspaper The Onion, but the downside, he said, “was that there are so many extremely talented writers there, there’s so much competition, and the voice is very specific.

Photo

Credit
Americangreetings.com

“When we talked about this site, it seemed like a way to build a unique voice while always ensuring that your ideas would make it in.”

Someecards.com now offers more than 1,000 cards, and Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Lundy add 40 to 50 cards a week, drawn from a variety of sources: random thoughts scribbled on napkins, stories from friends or inspiration from Clip Art images. “It’s starting to become profitable,” said Mr. Mitchell, “but we can’t quit our day jobs.”

Other media companies also offer e-cards, aimed at consumers who wouldn’t dare set foot in a Hallmark store. MTV.com allows users to send quirky animated greetings, some of which advertise MTV shows like “Punk’d,” “Jackass” and “The Osbournes.”

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

And last December, the marketing firm Buzztone acquired Hipstercards.com, an online greeting site that offers cards for such 21st-century occasions as the announcement of a new e-mail address or the introduction of a blog.

“The American Greetings people don’t see us as competition because we don’t have their numbers, and because we’re reaching out to a certain niche,” said Liz Heller, the chief executive of Buzztone. “It’s just like any shopping experience: sometimes you want something from a really unique little boutique, and sometimes you just want to go to Banana Republic.”

For some repeat customers, these edgier e-cards have taken the place of a tossed-off text or e-mail message.

“I’ve started communicating more-or-less exclusively through Someecards because it says everything I’m thinking,” said Eric Kind, 34, an executive assistant at Lionsgate Television in Los Angeles, who sends upward of 50 cards a week from the site. “A friend from work sent me a card that said, ‘Sorry I thought you were gay.’ Now everyone I know is sending them.”

The comedian Jessi Klein, who is writing for ABC’s upcoming sitcom “Samantha Who?” said she found a particular pathos in the online greetings of Someecards.com, because she also happens to be Mr. Lundy’s former girlfriend. “I actually think if Someecards was around when we were together, we would have had a much easier time communicating,” Ms. Klein said. “I like to think the ‘You put the “oy” in boyfriend’ card is a little tribute to our relationship.”